Real source of parent poverty is
Canada's legal system

The Ottawa Citizen

Letter-writer
Glenn
Cheriton
says the
high cost of
divorce must
be addressed
by the
justice
system.

Rod MacIvor,
The Ottawa
Citizen

The problem of civil courts being out of
reach of most Canadians is much worse than
portrayed by Justice John Gomery in the Citizen
article.

I would argue that much of the problems of
exorbitant costs and arbitrary civil procedures
are driven by the perverse incentives and
adversarial ideology of family law.

Research by Calgary's Institute for Law and the
Family shows 24 per cent of divorces are "high
conflict," which they defined as four or more
court actions in two years. Using the figures in
the article, I calculate that less than one per
cent of parents would have enough income left
over in a conflicted divorce, after child
support, taxes and legal fees to equal what he
or she would receive as a parent on welfare.

Those conflicted divorce parents (actually
parents who simply don't want to be cut out of
their children's lives) pay more in legal fees
than all divorced parents pay in child support.
The real source of child poverty is parent
poverty. The real source of parent poverty, at
least in divorce, is a huge, costly, arbitrary
and unnecessary legal profession and other
vested interests. I calculate the GST alone on
legal fees in excess of $100 million per year,
so the federal government uses parents and
children as a cash crop. Additionally, parents
pay up to $1 in income tax for every dollar
spent on legal fees.

Some Supreme Court justices pretend to care
about court costs for parents but are the same
ones who decide that parents are owed no duty of
care by child-welfare authorities -- i.e., that
parents have no rights, only responsibilities
and state employees have no responsibilities to
parents.

Virtually the only groups who can afford the
adversarial civil legal system in Canada are big
corporations and those with access to state
funds, such as child-welfare authorities. In
Canada, we don't have rule of law, we have rule
of lawyers.